


The Slow Path

by Steerpike13713



Series: Paths [2]
Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: 1920s, Bootlegging, Developing Relationship, F/M, Fake Marriage, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Stranded In The Past, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-07-13
Packaged: 2019-06-10 00:25:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15279534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Steerpike13713/pseuds/Steerpike13713
Summary: It was supposed to be a routine mission, dispatching a Rittenhouse sleeper agent in the January of 1920. Things went wrong, and now Lucy and Flynn are stranded in 1920s New York with no way home and nothing to do but wait for a rescue that may never come and do all they can to hinder Rittenhouse's efforts in the past while trying to make a life for themselves in New York's still-infamous Lower East Side.





	The Slow Path

The pawnshop they ended up in wasn’t, by quite a long margin, the worst of its kind in New York. They’d ended up in the Meatpacking District, a safe distance away from the sleeper agent’s comfortable apartment in newly-built Cathedral Heights. Lucy’s pearls and Flynn’s good suit had caught them their share of assessing looks from passers-by on the way over, right up until one particularly unwise pair of toughs had decided to show them just how little people ‘round here thought of slumming tours. Flynn hadn’t killed them, but waking up in nothing but their union suits in an alleyway with a pounding headache was, Lucy had argued, almost certainly lesson enough. Besides, their two would-be muggers had almost done them a favour. Flynn’s new suit was a little short for him in the leg and sleeve, and Lucy couldn’t pass for a boy even in an ill-fitting suit with the second mugger’s cap drawn down low over her face, but at least they no longer looked like the well-dressed couple that had been seen leaving an apartment building in Cathedral Heights where a murder would soon be found to have taken place.

They made an odd pair, standing together in the pawnshop, both in ill-fitting men’s suits, trying to hawk a bundle of clothes that could not look anything but stolen. They’d scraped together everything they could - Lucy’s pearl necklace and earrings, liberated from a shop in Albany when they first got to the ‘20s, Flynn’s pocket-watch, which he’d kept from his disguise for the 19th Amendment incident, the silver cigarette-case he’d stolen at the same time as the earrings, and the good clothes they’d worn in Albany and tracking down the sleeper in Upper Manhattan - but, looking at the lot of it together, it was hard to avoid just how dubious a pair of obvious ne’er-do-wells like them looked, bringing all that into a pawnshop, especially under the eye of the wizened proprietor of the place.

“Hm…” he said doubtfully, poking at the bundle with one long finger and drawing out Lucy’s dress to examine it for a moment, before abandoning it in favour of the watch and chain, peering at it in the dim light inside the shop. “Good make,” he said, “But not much call for it - never be able to move that along. Now, let’s have a look at these…”

He held up the pearls, and felt along the strand for knots.

“Hm. You say they’re real?”

“Definitely,” Lucy said, and then, just to be sure. “They were my grandmother’s. I wouldn’t sell them if I had another choice.”

The pawnbroker clucked his tongue. “Can’t trade on sentiment,” he said, frowning at them. “Hm. Clasp’s real, though. So’s the silk on the thread, and it’s knotted right, to keep the pearls good...no point in that with imitation.”

“If they were imitation, I’d have told you,” Lucy said, half craning her neck to see what Flynn was doing, prowling about the shop behind her.

“Hmm…” the proprietor said again. Lucy wished he would stop ‘hm’ing and give them a price. A  _ price  _ she could argue with, but you couldn’t come up with a defence against ‘hm’. He tapped his teeth with a long finger. “I’ll give you two dollars for this,” he said, holding up the watch by its fob.

Lucy snorted. “That wouldn’t pay for the chain!”

It had been meant to cost twelve dollars in the shop Flynn had taken it from the previous year (or a week and a half ago, depending on how the accounting was done) - nearly a hundred and seventy dollars in 2018 - and even if she couldn’t expect that much back in a shop like this, two dollars was still too little, even if they had technically paid nothing for the watch in the first place.

“Maybe not when it was new,” the pawnbroker agreed, as if the watch hadn’t been bought a week ago, in terms of actual days Flynn had owned it.

“It’s less than a year old!” Lucy protested. “I won’t take less than six for it.”

“You’re not getting more’n three, I can tell you that for-” the proprietor broke off, his gaze wandering upwards, as if transfixed by something behind Lucy. As if, in fact, the wispy young ‘man’s’ tall, dark, ill-mannered companion had chosen this exact moment to remind the pawnbroker of his presence. Lucy could feel the warmth of another body behind her, and smiled widely at the pawnbroker.

“Shall we say five?” she offered, “And call it even?”

They left the shop with eighteen dollars, which was less than half what their things had been worth, but still more than they could’ve expected under usual circumstances, especially when you factored in the cheap second-hand set of women’s clothing in Lucy’s size that they’d left the shop with in addition to the eighteen dollars. Lucy was still trying to remember if she’d read much on New York rents in this period, and where they might be able to get a bed for the night, when Flynn spoke up.

“You know, even in this sort of area, eighteen dollars won’t make rent.”

Lucy shrugged, “Fifty might be the cross-city average, but you can let a couple of rooms in the Lower East Side for less than twenty dollars a month.”

“Which would be a lot more useful if we  _ had  _ twenty dollars.”

“That’s how much it costs to rent directly,” Lucy corrected. “Subletting wasn’t uncommon in this sort of period, though we’re coming to the tail end of it now with tenement reforms, particularly in the slums. Mostly unmarried men, but you got a few young couples with no other options as well. Hope you’re not too attached to your privacy.”

Flynn shrugged. “I was in the army. Quite a few armies, actually. I’ve probably lived in worse.”

The depressing thing was, he was probably right.

They worked out their story on the walk over towards the Lower East Side, Lucy having flatly vetoed Hell’s Kitchen, which in this era still lived up to its name. The thing was, Lucy was a good decade older than most women were on marriage in this era, Flynn nearly two decades older than the average newly-married man. They didn’t technically need to explain it - late marriages did happen - but it still made them stand out, and they definitely didn’t know each other well enough to pass for an old married couple for any length of time to the people they’d be _ living with _ . They needed to disappear - there was no way the Rittenhouse of this time wouldn’t be looking for them, after what Flynn had done to Assembly Speaker Sweet - and even in a city like this one, the two of them stuck out like a pair of sore thumbs, together or apart.

“We don’t need to elaborate much,” Flynn pointed out when Lucy mentioned this. “People generally don’t notice little strangenesses if they’re not pointed out. If anyone asks, we’ll come up with something to tell them.”

“Which is why we should agree on what that ‘something’ should be before anyone does.”

Flynn gave her a sidelong look. “All right. What do you suggest?”

“Uh…” Honestly, Lucy was still coming up blank. “I could be- I mean, we both could be widowed? Between the war and Spanish influenza it’s not improbable in this era.”

There was a flicker of something across Flynn’s face, but he nodded. “Sounds plausible. So, second marriage, and we decide to move to New York out of nowhere for...no apparent reason.”

“You were the one saying no-one would ask,” Lucy pointed out, more than a little irritably. “Why, do  _ you  _ have any ideas about why we might’ve come here?”

Flynn shrugged. “Shortage of work, perhaps? More liberal area - maybe your family didn’t approve of you taking up with an immigrant Catholic.”

Lucy blinked. “ _ Are _ you Catholic?”

“Brought up that way. Wouldn’t call myself devout, and it’s been a while since I went to confession, but it’s a hard habit to break. Why?”

“Just curious. And I think that story works if anyone’s going to ask.” Lucy rubbed her face and sighed, “The worst of it is how much time we’re going to have to spend on the pretence. Most of the stories about families of ten plus lodgers all living in one room are more-or-less agreed to be just anti-immigrant propaganda, but still-”

Flynn grimaced. “We don’t have much of a choice.”

“No,” Lucy admitted. “But if you want to use another story - say I’m your sister or-”

Flynn snorted. “You really think anyone will buy that?”

Lucy tried to picture it, and failed. “No.”

“Looks like ‘married’ it is...unless you’d rather we rented separately. Might be difficult to make nine dollars each stretch that far, but…”

“No!” Lucy said again, a bit too quickly. “No. I...I’d rather we stick together. Rittenhouse might still be hunting us, and if the others  _ do  _ come back for us it’ll save time if we’re together.”

“All right.”

They walked in silence for a few minutes, until an idea came to Lucy.

“Flynn-”

“Garcia,” Flynn corrected.

“What?”

“We’re supposed to be married, aren’t we?” Flynn reminded her. “It’s going to look at least a little bit suspicious if you can’t even call me by name.”   
There, Lucy had to admit, he had a point. “Fine,  _ Garcia _ . We don’t know how long it’ll take the others to find us. We left them in Albany, if they look for us there-”

“Last time we were in Albany, we were assassinating the speaker of the New York State Assembly,” Flynn - Garcia - reminded her. “Just staying in the same state is risky enough.”

“Whereas if we leave, we’re resigning ourselves to staying stranded here forever, or until we cross our own timelines and...well, I don’t know exactly what’ll happen then. Rufus never went into much detail about what happened to the pilot who tried it.”

Garcia - she might as well get used to it - grimaced. “That gives us seven years before we find out.”

“They aren’t going to take seven years,” Lucy insisted. “Or...not for us. But we’ll need to leave them  _ something _ to find us with.”

“Might be an idea, but anything we leave for the team to find could also be picked up by the police in this era. I’d rather not have to answer questions about what happened to Speaker Sweet. Or the sleeper, for that matter.”

“It can’t be anything too obvious, anyway - I know you don’t care, but I don’t want to change history any more than I have to.”

“Why not?”

Lucy blinked. “What?”

Garcia shrugged. “Removing Rittenhouse...it would’ve changed everything. Every time they bought an election, leant on a politician, killed a rival, funded an inventor...it all adds up. And you were willing enough to let me wipe all that out in one go with David Rittenhouse, before you found out about the boy.”

“Since the other choice was watching you change things one event at a time…” Lucy shook her head. “I’m not arguing this now. If we change things too much and...I don’t know, prevent Wyatt or Rufus’s grandparents from meeting or something...then we’ll never get back to the present.”

“Focus on surviving here, first.” Garcia’s eyes were flicking over the crowd. “The sleeper we found probably wasn’t the only one. Not in this city, this time. Rittenhouse benefited from the 1920s economic boom like everyone else, but I can think of a few things they might want to change, in hindsight.”

Lucy huffed. “I have a few theories about that too. Did the journal say anything about what they might be planning?”

“There was something about the inauguration of the American Birth Control League, but that seems even more tenuous than the moon landing,” Garcia said, frowning. “I’m still not sure what I was supposed to achieve there.”

“...you were willing to leave those men to die in space when you didn’t even know why you were doing it?”

Garcia shrugged. “You said it was important.”

There was something staggering about the way he said that. That he’d enacted a whole plan even he didn’t know everything about just because...because it had come up in her journal. Which she had allegedly given to him. In which she would probably have recorded the events of that particular mission. Lucy was quite certain that was a paradox. But she believed he was telling the truth as he knew it. Had done for a while, in fact.

“Let’s just...find somewhere, before Rittenhouse realises we’re still in the city,” she muttered, not wanting to think about it any longer.

It took a while. Two days, in fact, the two of them sleeping that first night in what Garcia called a ‘cage hotel’ and Lucy’s academic sources on low-income housing in the 1920s had referred to as an SRO. One great long room, divided into cells barely big enough to lie down in with wooden boards and chickenwire. They’d had to pay more than the usual price for a couple to share one of those rooms - historically they’d primarily served unmarried men, transients - and Lucy hadn’t liked the way some of the men in the neighbouring cages had looked at her as she passed by, but it had been this or the street. They’d flipped a coin for the bed, at Lucy’s insistence, and Garcia had turned away so she could struggle out of her corset and lie down. By mutual agreement, they’d wedged the door shut with the one rickety chair before lying down to sleep.

The next day didn’t seem to start any more promisingly than the one before. The moral crusade against the evils of overcrowding in the tenements had never seen much success, when it came to bringing down the numbers of families that had taken in lodgers in order to cover the weekly rent, but for two people with no work or prospect of work, and whose ability to pay more than a few weeks’ rent was uncertain at best, neither of whom had a single friend or relation of any sort in New York to call on...Lucy was fully expecting it would mean another night in the SRO until the little old Eastern European lady who was next on their list of people who’d advertised they were willing to take in boarders gave them a beady-eyed look over the counter of her store.

“I have the apartment upstairs,” she said in clear, heavily-accented English. “I rent it and the shop together. We are not allowed lodgers. If I lose my shop to this-”

“No, no,” Garcia agreed quickly, “That is the last thing we would want-”

“And if you weren’t willing to take lodgers, why did you put up the sign in your window?” Lucy added, nodding at said sign.

The woman shifted a little.

“Business is not...as good as it used to be,” she admitted. “Rent is higher. I need to eat as much as anyone, and I can’t supply the shop and pay rent both at once.”

“And if you’re caught taking in lodgers, you’ll lose the shop and your apartment,” Lucy said, nodding. Figured. The zoning laws of the mid-1920s were still a few years away, and the worst of the panic might have died down, but night raids to combat the ‘lodger evil’ in the tenements were still a possibility. 

“I think I see the difficulty,” Garcia agreed, and then lapsed into - Lucy was quite sure it was Croatian - talking quickly and quietly, with many worried glances back at her. Lucy tried to look as if she knew what was going on, with, she thought, moderate success. “-so,” Garcia added, in English again, “If you were to, say, open your apartment to your  _ nephew  _ and his wife, recently returned from San Francisco…”

The old lady gave a faintly gummy, conspiring sort of smile. “Money in advance,” she said firmly, folding her skinny arms. “I won’t be cheated.”

“Precisely how much money?” Lucy said quickly.

The final tally evened out at six dollars a month, or not quite eighty dollars a month in twenty-first century terms, This was, objectively, quite good, considering six dollars a  _ night  _ was about what a reasonably good hotel would cost. On the other hand, they only had seventeen dollars to start with. A month and a half’s rent, plus money towards housekeeping, and they needed at least one change of clothes between now and the end of the week. The apartment itself was two rooms, a combined living-room and kitchen and a back bedroom that belonged to Mrs  Blažičević. They could, she said, take the trundle bed from her room, provided it fit in the corner of the main room and they could keep any goings-on quiet enough that she could sleep. Lucy and Garcia had carefully avoided each other’s eyes at that point.

“What did you say to her?” Lucy asks as soon as they’re alone. “Before.”

Garcia smirked a little, “Our cover story, among other things. I also suggested that, as we were both looking for work and she hasn’t any help in the shop…”

“You wouldn’t last ten minutes in customer service,” Lucy said, with absolute certainty.

After that, things went surprisingly smoothly. Well, all right, that was an exaggeration. On the other hand, Lucy had been sleeping on a lumpy sofa in a WWII-era bunker with unreliable heating for weeks now, and before that, she’d been a prisoner. The discomforts of life in a tenement in the 1920s were of a different sort. There was the initial awkwardness of attempting to share the truckle bed that first night (“Oh, for- Just get  _ in _ , Fl- Garcia. I promise, your virtue is safe with me.”), and the even greater awkwardness of having to get Garcia to help her lace her corset for her the next morning ( _ why  _ had she had to steal one that fastened in the back?) but other than that, it was fairly straightforward. That was not the same thing as ‘easy’. It was the start of the ‘20s economic boom - Prohibition came in just a week after they first moved in with Mrs Blažičević, to the old lady’s vocal disgust - but here in the Lower East Side, that didn’t mean much. There were jobs going everywhere, but for a mostly-immigrant neighbourhood all the boom had meant was that they’d shared in the disaster when the crash finally came. Lucy and Garcia would be forewarned - they had nine years to work it out - but that didn’t mean much if they couldn’t get their feet under them now. Lucy had been right - Garcia Flynn was  _ not  _ cut out for shop work. Lucy wasn’t great at it, but she’d had to deal with enough assholes she couldn’t be directly rude to in her life that she could more-or-less get by. Even so, they were running low on funds after a week - Garcia might be able to get by alternating between the two muggers’ stolen suits, but there were other necessities they hadn’t thought of. A ring for Lucy, to help with their cover story, spare socks and underwear and toothbrushes and all the little necessities no-one ever remembered until they found those things missing. It didn’t add up to much, buying cheaply and second-hand, but they hadn’t had much to start off with.

To both their surprise, Garcia had an easier time finding work than Lucy. Maybe that shouldn’t have been surprising - the 1920s had not been a good time to be an immigrant in this country, and that was the cover story they’d agreed on, but that immigrant labour had been so much cheaper than native-born was one of the main reasons why, as if people being desperate enough to work for all but nothing was a strike against them and not the men who set the wages - but it was anyway. Lucy had a harder time of it. She’d gone out for every job she was even remotely qualified for - stenographer, telephone operator, secretary - and been turned away each time, sometimes for lack of references, sometimes for the ‘Mrs’ in front of her name.

“Do you think it would help if I tell them we’re just pretending to be married so I can live with my former archenemy turned roommate without being found out by the secret government conspiracy hunting us?” she asked Garcia the night after the latest rejection, lying stacked atop each other like sardines in the truckle bed, her head on his chest for lack of anywhere else to put it.

She felt more than heard his answering chuckle. “If you want to tell Verica that she’s been party to us living in sin all this time, I won’t stop you, but you might want to find a backup place to stay first.”

Lucy gave an exaggerated sigh. “Marriage and a home or singlehood and work. I suppose it’s too late to try and go back to that last one.” She paused, and added. “Wait,  _ Verica _ ?”

“Mrs Blažičević.” He paused, and added. “She thinks our situation is terribly romantic. It’d break her heart to learn it was all a sordid shabby lie-”

“You’re making that up,” Lucy accused him, trying to control her laughter.

“Maybe a little. She does think it’s romantic, though.”

Lucy snickered. “Well, far be it from me to crush her illusions,” she said airly, as Garcia’s arm came around her. This, too, had become ordinary. It was too small a bed to be fussy about personal space, and in any case, Garcia was warm and it was a New York January in a building with no central heating. 

There was a pause, and then. “You never...really thought of me as your archenemy, did you?”

“A bit, in the beginning,” Lucy admitted. “Don’t look at me like that, you shot Lincoln. What did you do that for? You’re not telling me  _ Abraham Lincoln  _ was Rittenhouse-”

“Actually I’m pretty sure he wasn’t, but according to your journal Rittenhouse was re-consolidating its hold on power all through the Reconstruction. The Civil War weakened them - too many divisions within the ranks between those who felt keeping the whole country together and under Rittenhouse control should be the priority, and those whose incomes would be damaged by the abolitionist movement. Lincoln and Jackson might’ve meant well, but their policy of conciliating the white population of the south was playing right into Rittenhouse’s hands.”

“Rittenhouse and half the plantation-owners south of the Mason-Dixon Line,” Lucy muttered.  Lincoln might have been her childhood idol, but she’d been studying history too long to believe he’d been a saint, or that all his policies had been, in hindsight, the best thing to do for the country as a whole. 

“My - well, technically  _ your  _ \- point exactly.  What was the law in Florida again? Any black person who broke a labour contract could be sold for up to one year’s indentured servitude, children taken from their parents for bound ‘apprenticeships’ if a white judge judged their parents unable to provide a suitable home, with the former owner getting first refusal on their labour?” he snorted. “Not what freedom ought to look like, is it?”

Lucy could have told him exactly what that law had been - she’d lectured on the Black Codes of the post-Reconstruction South for years, and every year at least one student came up to her at the end of it, shell-shocked by the terrible injustice of it all - but...but Lincoln had been, by the standards of his time, a radical. Johnson hadn’t been. 

“And possibly reviving the Confederacy by crippling the Union government was a solution?” she demanded, indignant.

Garcia shifted. Lucy thought he looked faintly guilty, or was that ‘hoped’? “I hoped that a longer, bloodier civil war might mean a less lenient reconstruction. Redistribution of land and property would’ve done a great deal to weaken the southern slave-holding elite and undermine Rittenhouse - who, as you might imagine, had a lot of members among the old plantation-owners.”

On the other hand, with the four most powerful men in government dead and the Union in disarray...Lucy couldn’t say for sure that the Confederacy couldn’t possibly have won this longer, bloodier civil war that Garcia had hoped for, and even if they hadn’t, Rittenhouse might well have used the removal of the four most powerful men in government to insert more amenable puppets to advance their interests even further in both north and south. The number of family lines that would have been wiped out that way, though, the thousands of people in the modern day, and all their thousands of ancestors, who would all at once cease to exist, made it impossible to reckon the damage that might be done. Before she could open her mouth to argue any of these points, however,  there came a soft creak from the other room, and they fell silent.

“She isn’t-” Lucy hissed.

Garcia raised his eyebrows, and shifted a little under her, making the bed creak alarmingly. Lucy blinked, for a moment confused...then did the same, eliciting another loud creak. They listened, with bated breath, to the sound of shuffling footsteps in the other room.

“All right,” Garcia said after a moment. “I think she’s gone back to bed.”

Lucy relaxed a little, then a thought struck her. “...you know she’s going to be unbearable about this in the morning.”

She was proven right at breakfast, where Mrs Blažičević made no less than six sly comments about how, really, she understood, she’d been just the same with her own dear Jakov, but could they please try to keep their goings-on quiet, because this wasn’t the first night she’d had her sleep disturbed like this. Lucy had caught Garcia’s eye at that, and then they’d both looked away quickly so as to avoid laughing and giving themselves away.

They were almost into February, in the end, before Lucy hit on work. It was a factory job, long hours, low pay, hazardous working conditions. The 1920s had been a step up from what came before them, but that wasn’t saying much at all. Garcia’s work at the docks wasn’t much better. They made rent that second month by the skin of their teeth, and even then they wouldn’t have lasted long without the scant remains of the money they’d arrived with. And still, there had been no sign of rescue. They hadn’t had a chance to send a message back to the future yet, the Wall Street Bombing wasn’t until September, and they’d been so busy just scratching out a living so far that there had been no opportunity to search for the other sleeper agents. Even then, there was no guarantee they’d leave a clue the others would find even when they did manage to find the time for concerns bigger than whether they were going to afford to eat this week. Their situation hadn’t been brilliant to start off with, but now...Lucy dragged herself home every night dog-tired, aching, usually hungry, and increasingly certain that no rescue was coming. The team would do their best, but they could only find what was there to be found, if they weren’t going to just come straight back and search from where they’d left. Even if they did try that, New York was a hundred and thirty miles from Albany and there were enough slums in New York that there was no guarantee they’d be found. Their only safety from Rittenhouse lay in their anonymity, but that same anonymity kept them from being found and rescued by their friends. There was a certain bitter irony in that, if you looked at it the right way.

Spring came, and the grind of life hardly changed. They kept themselves to themselves, just as they had from the start, saved what little they could, kept up the pretence during the day and compared notes on Rittenhouse and how to get a message to the bunker by night. By the end of March, the factory had dismissed all its female workers. The last soldiers had returned from the war months ago, but the factories didn’t catch up all at once, and this one had been among the last holdouts. Lucy had known her window was short, but she’d expected to have another job ready by then - the position at the factory had only ever been a stopgap - and not have to scour the job advertisements every day and eventually resort to lying and putting ‘Miss’ on her application, just to get a job as an assistant in a midtown department store. A year ago, give or take a few months and ninety years, she’d been up for tenure at Stanford. On the other hand, the pay was better, the hours shorter, the working conditions less hazardous, and for the first time they had some hope of having a little money left over once rent was paid for the month. There was another development that came with the job at the department store, though, and the development was Queenie.

Queenie Rosenberg had been another applicant for the same job, another girl from the Lower East Side, even if she’d come from a slightly better part of the neighbourhood than Lucy currently did. She shared a two-room apartment with her sister (or possibly ‘sister’ - Lucy hadn’t asked, but something about the way Queenie had said it made it sound like a cover story. Lucy was getting to be rather an expert on those.) Sarah and their pet cat, and had, up until recently, worked in one of the stores that sold takeaway knish in the Lower East Side. Lucy knew all of this, because they’d been sat next to each other in the waiting-room before interview, and once you got Queenie talking you could give up any hope of ever getting her to stop.

They’d both ended up with jobs, it turned out - Lucy had been worried, being a good decade older than most of the other women who’d gone out for this job. She’d heard the interviewer mutter something about old maids as she’d left, even, which had made her devoutly wish that Wyatt and Rufus would get their act together and come back to the 1920s before she had to live any longer in a time where the phrase ‘old maid’ was still in common parlance. Lucy had been worried about that at first - she’d lied to her employers, after all, and anyone who could expose the lie could lose her the best-paying job either she or Garcia had found in months. That worry had lasted about a week, in the end. Right up until they’d met in the street - god, they couldn’t live more than a block apart - with Lucy wearing her ring and Queenie arm-in-arm with a woman who did not look as if they could possibly pass for blood sisters. After that, it seemed like they had some sort of tacit agreement that their secrets were off-limits to both of them.

There was another change in the wind as spring wore on and Garcia found a steady job. It really shouldn’t have been so surprising - he was staggeringly overqualified for basically everything he’d been doing thus far, and both of them knew it - and yet, nothing had ever stuck until now. Rather more alarming was the fact that he’d named his new employers as ‘olive oil importers’, with a significant glance at Lucy, over dinner with Mrs Blažičević. And, all right, mafia films weren’t Lucy’s favourite...but even she knew that one.

“The  _ mob _ , Garcia?” she demanded that night, lying coiled chastely together in their narrow bed.

Garcia shrugged, quite unrepentant. “Not exactly. It’s a much smaller operation than that - just a few guys from the docks who thought it might be worthwhile to see how much people will pay for the chance to drink again.”

Lucy rolled over a little more to look him in the face. “...you’re going into bootlegging,” she summarised.

“Yes.”

She shoved him. “You are going into  _ bootlegging! _ ”

Garcia rolled with it, his shoulder hitting the wall, “Yes! What, you’re shocked by that? It’s hardly the worst thing I’ve ever done.”

“If you get caught - how long do you think you’ll last in a 1920s prison with Rittenhouse probably still looking for the people who killed Speaker Sweet?”

“Assuming we get caught,” Garcia reminded her, smirking a little. “Even if I do, I survived a modern prison with Rittenhouse after me for things they knew for sure I’d done.”

Lucy nearly growled. “You could’ve told me earlier!”

Garcia blinked. “...how? I just got brought in today.”

Which...there was something very...there was something in that. Terrible as Garcia’s decisions might be sometimes, Lucy would always be the first to know about them.

She frowned and thought that over. “I didn’t think you’d made any friends close enough to trust you with something like this…” She caught the faintly guilty look on his face and sighed. “You suggested it.”

Garcia rubbed the back of his neck. “I might’ve...hinted a bit. That I knew how to go about getting things done without drawing the attention of the police.”

“You- Of course you did. I don’t even know why I’m surprised! But- Look, we’re supposed to be in this together. If one of us got caught- I need to know when you’re planning something like this!”

Garcia was still for a moment beside her, and then. “It wasn’t exactly planned.”

“You just said-”

He shrugged. “I knew Kovac’s brother had a stock of illegal alcohol that he was selling on the side. I didn’t know it would go further than that. Honestly, it seemed most likely he’d run out within the year, but it wasn’t doing anyone any harm.”

“But now that’s changed.”

Garcia shifted a little, “I didn’t know he’d started a still,” he admitted, scowling. Yes, that gap in knowledge would wear on him. “They want my help setting up a speakeasy. You know these men - most of them haven’t committed a serious crime in their lives before now.”

“Well, you’re certainly overqualified there,” Lucy said, before she could think better of it.

Garcia snorted, but went on. “I know it’s dangerous. But since we’re never going to get home if we’re too busy worrying whether we’ll make rent to get a message back-”

“I know.” Lucy rolled over. “And there were enough gangs operating in New York in this period that it shouldn’t even be too great a change.”

Besides, even if they did draw attention...gangsters were popular history, the sort of thing one of the others might take an interest in. It wasn’t much to go on, but the wait until September and the Wall Street Bombing, their first chance to draw some attention from the future, seemed impossibly long just then.

The bombing itself was a problem too. They were both in agreement that Rittenhouse were likely involved somehow - they both knew J.P. Morgan had been a member of the organisation, and it didn’t look like a coincidence that it was his bank the bombing happened at. On the other hand, almost all of the known casualties from the bombing in their original timeline had been young people - messengers, stenographers, clerks, brokers - rather than anyone they might expect to be a major player in an organisation like Rittenhouse. And then there was the bombing itself - so conveniently timed to provoke reactionary outrage, so deliberately destructive, with the sash weights that had been intended to act as shrapnel and the very  _ public  _ thoroughfare it had happened on, and the utter lack of any apparent specific target, with most of the buildings nearby taking only minor damage. There were rational explanations, of course - Mario Buda was fingered by several historians as the most likely perpetrator of the bombing, an assertion supported by the testimony of a fellow anarchist and Buda’s own nephew. If you believed that theory, the attack had been revenge for the arrests of the  Galleanists  Sacco and Vanzetti. Buda had certainly been in New York at the time of the bombing, though he had never been arrested or questioned by police. They had no real evidence that he had been a Rittenhouse catspaw - he’d been suspected in bombings before this one, and the  Galleanists had launched other attacks after this one. They could not look at every mystery in American history and declare ‘Rittenhouse’ for lack of any other evidence. Maybe they were getting paranoid, jumping at shadows. Maybe they’d been trapped without contact or meaningful opportunities to continue the fight for far too long. On the other hand, it was the nearest thing to a lead they had. 

Unfortunately, while there were several excellent textbook sources on the Wall Street Bombing, Lucy had written none of them, and while she had held an interest in the First Red Scare and how it had shaped America in the early 20th century, this particular bombing had not featured greatly in her research into the period. She did not know Buda’s movements before the bombing, did not even know when he had arrived in New York. It had been one incident in a flood of them that she had studied, and not one that had particularly caught her interest. Significant, yes, but anti-anarchist and anti-immigrant sentiment had already been running high and Buda was only the most likely of a number of suspects.

That particular doubt festered all through May, and into June afterwards, as temperatures soared and Mrs  Blažičević’s poky living-room became a sticky hell, with Garcia and Lucy holding each other at arm’s length as best they could in the narrow bed, the tight quarters that had made sharing body heat such a simple solution in winter now impossible to endure for long. Maybe it was better that way. Ignoring the inevitable side-effects of two healthy adults forced to share a bed for an extended period, and the attendant uncomfortable knowledge of one another’s bodies that came with it, was something they’d both gotten good at, since being stranded here. Lucy certainly wasn’t going to pretend there wasn’t at least a little basic physical attraction there, because that had been the case since...not since they met. But since Watergate, at least. Maybe since before that, but Watergate was when she’d noticed it. They were adults, and more than that they were both professionals (if in very different professions), and they could both deal with finding each other attractive without it turning into some great drama. And...yes, all right, she liked his company. Not that Rufus and Jiya and Denise and...and the rest weren’t good people to talk to, but she’d almost forgotten how nice it was to be able to have a conversation about history without having to stop and explain herself every few minutes. On the other hand...well, it wasn’t as if Lucy hadn’t been in this position before. Good company and physical attraction were all well and good, but with colleagues it was dangerous to act on either. Lucy had made that mistake once with a pretty visiting professor from St Andrews with a cute accent and great dark eyes that shone when she talked about Rome. The two of them had ended up awkwardly avoiding each other’s eyes in department meetings for the rest of the year afterwards, and it was honestly a relief that, as a classicist and a modernist, they attended hardly any of the same conferences anyway. The point was, she and Garcia...they worked well together. They were friends. That was enough on its own, and neither of them would gain anything by complicating matters further. And it would be much easier to remember that if it weren’t for the ongoing pretence.

Before they’d developed a social life, it had been much less of a problem. Mrs Blažičević was nosy, yes, but she’d developed the idea early on that they were shy about being too obviously demonstrative in front of people, and both Lucy and Garcia had seen the sense in leaning into that perception. Certainly Mrs Blažičević had not seemed to have any difficulty with believing they were married, even in the beginning, when they’d still been stiff and awkward and learning how to live with each other in these abruptly closer quarters. Maybe Lucy should have expected that - people saw what they expected to see, even when looking for lies. The problem with that was, what had convinced their elderly landlady didn’t pass muster with people who weren’t privy to alarmingly creaking bed-springs in the middle of the night.

A big opening night for a speakeasy wasn’t really a given, especially not a place like the Blind Tiger, which was still, by necessity, mostly a secret. Word would spread, Garcia had assured her, by word of mouth, and to trusted people, and then more and more widely as their supply chain became more stable. All the same, whether or not it made sense...people liked a party.

The drink was flowing about as freely as could be managed, even if Lucy still wasn’t altogether sure it wouldn’t send anyone blind from poor distilling practices no matter how many times Garcia swore they’d been careful. ‘Careful’ meant something different from the man who’d crashed the Hindenburg. Someone had even managed to dig up a band from somewhere, massacring popular songs on a wheezy accordion and the second- or third-hand piano that Garcia’s co-worker Isaac from the docks had managed to scrounge up from somewhere. They were operating out of the cellar of Kovac’s Tobacconist’s, since the Kovac who ran the place had been the one with the stock of illegal alcohol that started the whole thing, and though it was a fair-sized cellar, and this gathering only a small one, when the tables had been pushed to the edges of the room to open up enough space to dance there really wasn’t much space left over.

Lucy was at the bar, drinking wine she was pretty sure had been made using the grape-juice-and-yeast method, and was therefore probably safe, when the trouble started.

“Hey there hotsy-totsy, can I buy you a drink?”

Lucy looked around to see a pimply teenager, younger than most of her students, standing there looking expectant.

“I’m a bit old for you, aren’t I?” she said, taking a very pointed sip of her drink.

“A dish is a dish, and you are one fine dish,” the boy said, slicking back his hair one-handed and smirking in a way that was probably supposed to look devil-may-care and charming, and didn’t. He had confidence at least, although Lucy wasn’t sure that was a point in his favour when she was almost squirming with second-hand embarrassment on his behalf.

Lucy waved him away, “Well, that’s flattering, but I’m not interested in anyone who isn’t old enough to shave.”

The kid’s face twisted. “I shave, gal! Every morning. You don’t have to be all high-hat about it.”

Lucy cast a doubtful look at the kid’s smooth, acne-spotted jawline. “Good for you, but the answer’s still no. Go bother someone your own age.”   
“Come on, I’m not stringing any lines here, I genuinely think you’re a top notch sheba. All I wanna do is buy you a drink. Isn’t that what we’re all here for?”

Lucy lifted her glass. “I’m set, thank you.”

The kid huffed and leaned against the bar, “I don’t wanna brag or nothing, but my big brother’s part of this operation here, so I can get you the really good stuff, ya follow?”

“So’s my husband,” Lucy said shortly. She hadn’t wanted to resort to this. Garcia would be  _ insufferably  _ pleased with himself if he ever found out she’d threatened someone with him. “That’s him,” she added, nodding at Garcia, who was over at the far side of the bar, talking to Kovac about something - she hadn’t asked what.

There was something rather gratifying about the way the kid’s face turned a sort of sickly greyish-white at that. Even for someone who didn’t know what Garcia was capable of...well, he was over six feet tall and well-muscled enough to put off someone a lot bigger and scarier than this kid. Regrettably, the kid was either drunker or stupider than Lucy had bargained for, because he recovered quickly.

“Big sap like him? No way he’s got enough shiek to land a broad like you. I heard he’s a dropper.” The kid’s voice had dropped to a whisper on that last part.

Lucy paused. “Well, in a  _ sense _ ,” she allowed. Soldiers were, when you got down to it, basically just paid killers who got paid a salary rather than going by commissions. She paused, and added, “And you’re hardly one to say anyone hasn’t got ‘shiek’. Most women don’t give points for persistence, you know.”

The boy’s face had  turned an ugly turkey red. “You shouldn’t talk to me like I’m some palooka. I was tryin’ to be nice.”

“If you were, you’d have listened to ‘no’. It’s not a complicated word,” Lucy snapped, wishing the kid would just go away and stop pushing his luck. “As for being a palooka...if you really do think Garcia’s a hired killer, are you sure making a pass at his wife’s the smartest thing you could be doing with your evening?”

“You still claiming to be his frau? No one really buys that flimflam.”

Lucy blinked. “What flimflam?”

“My brother told me  _ all  _ about that cat and the way he talks about his bird, and not even he believes him.”

“...he talks about me?”

Lucy hadn’t considered that. All right, Garcia didn’t have yet another pretence to keep up at work, but...she hadn’t considered he’d talk about her if he didn’t have to. Or- He could have been talking about Lorena, using some of that truth to bolster the lie, but...No. Not the priority right now. They were  _ friends _ . And, frankly, pretending to be a married woman pretending to be single was convoluted enough without being an unmarried-but-romantically-involved woman pretending to be a married woman pretending to be single just to hold down a shitty job at a department store.

“He talks about  _ somebody _ , but no one really thinks it’s true. If you’re really his frau, prove it.”

If Lucy had been sensible, she’d have told the kid she didn’t need to prove anything and he really ought to stop making passes at women twice his age before one of them took him up on it. She didn’t do that. Part of that was the smirk on the kid’s face - she’d never seen anyone look that self-satisfied before, as if he’d just scored several hundred points and backed her into a corner. Part of it, she could justify as shoring up their cover. The rest was just sheer contrariness.

She drained her drink and walked off, ignoring the kid’s protests that hey, she couldn’t ignore him, his brother owned a part-share in this place, he could get her kicked out if he wanted. Garcia was still deep in conversation with Kovac, but he looked around when she came up to them.

“Lucy,” he said, nodding and shifting a little so that she could move in on the conversation. Lucy paused for a moment, and wondered if she was really going to do this just to prove some arrogant kid wrong.

“Hi,” she said, smiling a little awkwardly and then, before she could talk herself out of it, went up on her toes, grabbed him by the lapels and just went for it.

Garcia’s mouth tasted of salt and cheap moonshine, his body warm against her as his hands came to settle on her waist. His mouth opened under hers for a moment, a curious tongue slipping out to trace against her lips...and then, all at once, it was over.

“...what was that for?” Garcia said in an undertone when they parted.

Lucy shrugged, and cast a glance back at the twerp who was, gratifyingly, standing there gaping and looking even more foolish than he had before. “I’m not allowed to kiss my own husband?” she said teasingly, just loud enough to be overheard by Kovac, who looks almost as taken aback as the twerp had done before. What had Garcia been  _ saying  _ about her?

“You don’t usually...I mean, not in public,” Garcia corrected himself hastily.

Lucy leaned against him a little, less for spite this time than because...well, he was warm, and she’d been on her feet all evening. “We don’t have anything to hide anymore,” she said, with a significant glance up at him. Garcia, thankfully, took the point.

“No,” he lied, and the way he looked at her then was...strange. Was something she had not seen in him since that cellar in 1954, more than a year ago now. “I suppose we don’t.”

Kovac cleared his throat then, and said, “So, you’re the famous Lucy. Some of the boys were starting to wonder if you were real at all!”

“Thanks for that,” Garcia muttered, with an expression like a cat that had just received an unexpected drenching. “Really.”

“I’m very real,” Lucy said, determinedly unbothered. “What  _ has  _ he been telling you about me?”

Quite a lot, as it turned out. And, all right, Flynn had never been shy about talking about Lucy even when they’d been enemies - Lucy still remembered his absolute certainty when telling Wyatt and Rufus that she knew everything there was to know about Benedict Arnold, the delighted edge to his voice when he’d said that the two of them would be quite a team one day - but that was a very different thing to gushing about her to colleagues, and somehow she had thought he wouldn’t be the type.

“-but you can see why we didn’t think you were real,” Kovac was saying now. “I mean, no offence, but what you came from…sounds all a bit melodramatic to most people.”

Lucy gave Garcia a sideways look. “It felt that way, sometimes.”

He didn’t look even slightly abashed at the reminder, which was really no more than Lucy should have expected. It had felt melodramatic. And ridiculous, and- and dangerous. Like she’d just run a red light without meaning to and was still half-expecting a semi to plough straight into her. Even after she was certain he would never really hurt her, that sense of danger had lingered. It was hard to remember that feeling, here and now in a dingy basement bar, seventeen years before their first meeting.

“Not to me, it didn’t,” Garcia retorted. “Frustrating, a lot of the time, but-”

“Oh, of course. Because you’ve  _ never  _ been unnecessarily dramatic just for the sake of it,” Lucy retorted, thinking of Jesse James.

“Not  _ unnecessarily  _ dramatic,” Garcia protested.

Lucy snorted. “You’re ridiculous,” she said fondly.

Off to the side, she could hear Kovac giving a ‘kids today and their PDA’ sort of chuckle, which sounded a lot more ridiculous from a man who couldn’t have more than five years on Garcia.

“Why don’t I leave you two to it, since I clearly won’t be getting any sense out of Flynn ‘til you’ve left,” Kovac put in, draining his drink. “Nice to meet you, Mrs Flynn.”

It shouldn’t have had any particular effect on Lucy, to hear it said aloud. Except that at work she was still going by ‘Preston’, her friends - well, friend - call her Lucy and Mrs Blažičević didn’t stand on ceremony either, and beyond that, Lucy’s social circle was not so much ‘limited’ as ‘nonexistent’. So, with all that, it shouldn’t really have been surprising that she’d managed to get through almost half a year’s worth of ‘married life’ hardly answering to ‘Mrs Flynn’ at all.

“So,” Garcia said quietly, once Kovac had gone. “I’m assuming there was a reason you came over here.”

Lucy shrugged. “Pushy teenage boy who didn’t understand the word ‘no’. I figured being fake-married to the most dangerous man in the room had to come in useful for  _ something _ .”

“What, getting things off high shelves isn’t use enough for you anymore?”

Lucy scowled at him. “I’m not  _ that  _ short.” She glanced around the room, “Where’s Queenie? She said she’d be here.”

Well, actually she’d said that she wasn’t going to turn down cheap giggle-water, but it amounted to the same thing. Lucy would cautiously call them friends, after a fashion. Work friends, maybe, in that they kept each other’s secrets and got along well enough when they did talk, but weren’t that close when you came right down to it.

“Over there in the corner,” Garcia replied, nodding at said corner. “You want to say hello?”

Lucy shrugged. “She already knows I’m lying at work, might as well. Besides,” she added, “I could do with a friend here.”

Garcia nodded. “This something you’d rather do alone, or-”

“No, no, you might as well come along and ward off the rest of the creeps,” Lucy said, grabbing his arm. “Besides. It’s easier if we’re being open about it. If she thinks I’m blackmailing her, we’re sunk.”

“She the sort who’d leap to that conclusion? You know her better than I do.”

“Queenie isn’t,” Lucy admitted. “Sarah might be. I say we don’t risk it.”

Queenie and Sarah had found a table in the far corner, a study in contrasts. Queenie, blonde and coiffed and with a peachy sort of Marilyn Monroe quality that a younger Lucy would’ve sighed over, and shorter, leaner, dark-haired Sarah, who watched the world through wary dark eyes and never seemed to relax. Queenie looked up as they came over and beamed.

“Lucy! And- Oh.” Queenie’s eyes went comically wide at the sight of Garcia looming over Lucy’s shoulder.

“Hi,” Lucy said, smiling awkwardly. “Uh...mind if we join you?”

“No!” Queenie said quickly, pulling her hand from under the table. “No, not at- Uh. Hi.”

Sarah gave the pair of them a challenging look. “And who’s he supposed to be?”

“Garcia Flynn,” Garcia offered, “I’m-” his eyes flicked to Lucy, as if waiting for a cue.

Lucy shrugged, “He’s my husband,” she admitted. “You’re not going to tell anyone at work, are you?”

“No! That is, I-” Queenie gave an awkward little laugh. “I sort of assumed you were...I mean, I knew you were hiding something, but-”

Lucy coughed, “Well…” she said, “You’re...not far wrong.”

“Oh. Uh...lavender arrangement?”

“No,” Garcia said. “Not...exactly.”

Lucy glanced at him, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes. Sarah did, however, across the table, and nodded in a perfunctory sort of way. Lucy nodded back. It seemed some things stayed consistent all across history, and one of them was that look of recognition when you realised you had a common secret. Not that there had been any reason for it to be a secret in 2018, except that she’d planned on coming out to her mother the same night she’d planned on telling Carol that she wanted to drop out of Stanford and sing in a band with Marissa, and after the car wreck she hadn’t really felt up to either.

“So, what brings you over here?” Sarah asked, eyeing the two of them. “You’re taking a risk letting something like that slip.”

Lucy shrugged. “Honestly...I assumed you knew. I mean, we don’t live that far from each other, it was bound to get out eventually. So,” she added hastily, “What do you do?”

“Schoolteacher,” Sarah said, with a wry sort of smile. “Sciences.”

Garcia blinked. “Really?” he said, in the sort of tone that meant he was planning something.

“Yes,” Sarah says, her chin jerking up defensively. “Really.”

“No, no, it’s just...Lucy here used to be in a...similar line of work.”

Lucy’s head snapped around automatically before she realised what he was doing, and then she forced herself to relax. “History, not science,” she admitted, “But...yeah. I had to give it up when we moved from California - I don’t even know if my certification would apply in New York.”

Of course he’d remember that argument. Teaching would have been her first choice of job, even if it would have to be at a much lower level and under all the bullshit restrictions of America in the run-up to the Scopes trial. Unfortunately, since neither of them had the wherewithal right now to fake up the newly-introduced qualifications she needed to get a teaching job, that idea had seemed like a dead end.

“Wouldn’t know, I’ve never been out of the state,” Sarah admitted. “Wouldn’t go that far south if you paid me - it’s hard enough dealing with complaints about evolution here.”

“We’re from the northern end,” Lucy supplied, “Palo Alto, if you’re interested. But...I am with you on the evolution debate. It’s ridiculous that  _ any  _ one religion should have that sort of control over public schools. What happened to separation of church and state?”

“I don’t think this lot have heard about it.”

Queenie laughed and nudged Sarah with her shoulder, “Oh, don’t- Don’t get her started,  _ please _ , I still have to live with her!”

“I don’t talk about it that much!” Sarah grumbled.

“You woke me up in the middle of the night to yell about it, sweetie. Two nights running.”

“The school board were being idiots.”

“According to you, they’re always idiots.”

“Can’t exactly fault her logic,” Garcia said, raising his eyebrows. “Didn’t think the moral crusade got this far north.”

“Oh, they’re not about to outlaw it or anything, not in New York, but the way these parents carry on! Most of them don’t even want to send their kids to school when they could be working.”

Lucy grimaced. “Sounds rough. History’s...well, ok, you get about as many people complaining about how you teach history. Don’t want anyone sullying America’s image by mentioning any of the skeletons in the national closet.”

“Technically that might already be illegal, if you stretch the Sedition Act far enough,” Garcia supplied, scowling.

“It’d certainly drive the school board into a lather,” Sarah admitted, smiling an absurd face-transforming smile that was really quite unfair. “So, what, you quit to get married?”

Lucy shook her head. “My...uh. My family didn’t approve of me working,” she lied. “My...grandfather had some pull with the school board back in Palo Alto, got me fired.”

Sarah blinked. “Ouch.”

“Is that why…” Queenie started. “I mean...California! It’s a long way from old New York.” She gave Lucy a look from under her lashes. “Must be some reason you came all this way.”

“It’s...part of why,” Lucy hedged, glancing over at Garcia.

“Lucy’s family didn’t exactly approve of her running off with an immigrant Catholic either,” Garcia said bluntly. “And, unfortunately, they’ve got pull with more than just one school board in Palo Alto. We figured New York was far enough away to be safe.”

“Guess that explains how you get around management,” Queenie said, laughing. “Never saw anyone so affronted.”

“I don’t appreciate being talked about when I’m standing right there,” Lucy retorted, stung. “And especially not that sort of talk. If they want to leer, they can do it when I’m not in the damn room.”

Garcia glanced at her, the same look he’d given her in Salem before starting in on Joseph Pope, as if he were asking for permission. She gave a minute shake of the head. Letting Garcia loose on rank-and-file creeps was like using a flamethrower to get rid of a spider - satisfying in the short term, but not worth the property damage, legal issues and possible death it would cause in the long run.

“That’s what I mean, though!” Queenie said. “You- Ok, yeah, those guys are pigs and there’s no reason you should stand for it, but it shouldn’t- most gals aren’t  _ surprised _ , you know?”

Lucy blinked. She’d thought she was getting used to it by this point. Which...ok, yeah, she still hated it, but so did pretty much everyone else. She hadn’t thought how much she hated it was either obvious or unusual.

“I wouldn’t say I’m  _ surprised- _ ” she started.

“Relax, honey, I get it. Guessing your family had money, right? It’s all social calls and boys who mind their manners until suddenly you’re down here in the Lower East Side with cockroaches in the walls and guys thinking they can grab you any old way.” Queenie smiled, though her eyes were on Sarah, not Lucy. “Takes a lot to give all that up for love.”

Lucy shifted, suddenly uncomfortable. “I...wouldn’t go that far. I mean...I’m not sure I’d say ‘minded their manners’, but...” She forced a smile. There was really no explanation she could give. “Thanks, I guess.”

The conversation got a bit side-tracked after that, swapping stories with Sarah about particularly outrageous student misbehaviour. Lucy had to edit her stories even more heavily than she’d thought she’d have to, but...well. Female academics weren’t unknown in this era - it had been thirty-five years, at this point, since Bryn Mawr College became the first US college to offer women graduate degrees - but in this day and age Lucy couldn’t fake the qualifications to claim to be one of them the way she could’ve faked 1920s documentation in the twenty-first century - it felt silly, thinking of it as the ‘modern day’ when her day-to-day life was here - and being a former college professor would be a lot easier to disprove than being just another teacher even if it was nearer the truth. By the end of the bottle, Sarah was nearly shaking with laughter, Queenie hanging off her, giggling, and even Garcia was relaxed and sleepy-eyed, watching them with a pleased, private sort of smile, as if he were in on a joke no-one else knew.

“-got to give him credit for honesty,” Lucy was saying, pleasantly buzzed but not drunk yet, smiling despite herself. Editing aside, it was a good story. “If nothing else. I miss it,” she added, and, oh, apparently she was drunker than she’d thought, because she’d never have admitted to that one sober. “I haven’t been able to teach in...longer than it’s been since we married,” she corrected quickly. “Years longer.”

“How long has it been?” Sarah asked, a polite, social sort of questions.

“Six months,” Garcia said, his voice oddly hoarse. 

“Newlyweds!” Queenie said, beaming at the two of them. “Just six months, really?”

“It had been coming for...a very long time, before that,” Garcia said quietly.

Lucy blinked. “...really?”

“From the first time I saw you, really.” Garcia hunched a little in his seat. “I...wouldn’t call it love. I wasn’t...capable of it, then. But you always had my attention.”

For a moment, Lucy almost forgot it was a lie. She wanted, very much, to kiss him again, for having noticed her. For having always noticed her. For putting enough faith in her words, her plan, to declare war on time itself on her say-so, even if it had been in another woman’s name. A lot of what he had done had been terrible, but- Lucy had been, for so much of her life, overlooked and ignored, forever in the shadow of her more successful mother or more outgoing sister, constantly having to justify her presence even at conferences and in halls she should have been able to walk with confidence. And, after all that, for a man like Garcia Flynn to sit there and say that he had always, always seen her...however much she might deplore some of the actions he had taken on the strength of her word, there was something heady about hearing it said aloud.

“And you?” she said, too distracted and too drunk to quite think it through, “How long has it been for you two?”

There was a long, silent, awkward pause, and then Sarah cleared her throat. 

“Five years,” she said quietly, her eyes darting around the bar warily. “Met at a suffragette meeting.”   
“My  _ actual  _ sister dragged me along,” Queenie added, with a tight sort of smile. “She’s over on that side of the Pond now. Met an English guy during the war while we were over there - we volunteered for the nursing programme when war was declared - and decided to stick around. It’s been ages since we talked.” She looked a little sad to speak of it, and Sarah put an arm around her shoulders with a faint glare at Lucy.

“I was more involved with the movement than that,” Sarah said curtly, pulling Queenie a little closer. “Problem with that?”

“None at all,” Garcia assured her, sharing a smile with Lucy. “Were you at the march last spring? We heard about it back in California.”

“I was somewhere at the back,” Sarah admitted, scowling a little. “Didn’t seem like much of a hope at the time, but…”

“I heard about Miss Paul’s death,” Lucy said gently. “Did you- Did you know her?”

“Me? No.” Sarah shrugged. “I knew of her, but we didn’t exactly run in the same circles. We weren’t part of the same group, or anything. You’re with the cause?”

“As best I can be.” Lucy forced a smile. “I don’t really know where to find others in New York, though. I’ve been out of the loop. But the fight can’t end with the vote - we’ve got a long way to go.”

“I can put you in touch with a few people,” Sarah offered, “Or Queenie can - she knows more of them than I do.”

Ah. More involved with the suffrage movement than she’d wanted to admit? Or just sociable? It was hard to tell, with Queenie, who wanted so very much to be generally approved of that it was hard to tell which views she genuinely held and which she had adopted as protective colouration.

“While we’re at it,” Sarah went on, “Would you go back to teaching, given half a chance?”

“In a heartbeat,” Lucy admitted, startled to find it was true. However much her students might have driven her up the wall sometimes, she still missed teaching. She’d missed it for a long time now. Ever since she’d had to give it up to chase first Garcia and then her mother and Emma through time trying to keep them from breaking the world beyond all repair. It wasn’t that she didn’t love the experience of stepping into history, seeing what she’d only read about before...but it wore on her. Sometimes, she wished more than anything that she could wake up and find herself at home in bed with Amy swearing at the fire alarm and a full day of lectures to look forward to.

“Well, you’re in luck. We’ve been understaffed for months - no-one wants to teach in the Lower East Side - and so the school board’s relaxed a little on the ‘no married teachers’ rule.” Sarah shrugged. “It’s not a guarantee, but I can ask around. Although...if you’ve any plans on a family, I should warn you, they might accept married teachers, but mothers-”

“More or less everywhere frowns on that,” Lucy agreed, grimacing. “But- No. It’s not likely.”

Even if they had been involved...Lucy wasn’t sure she could ever bring herself to have children, knowing what she did now. She’d always sort of assumed she would - Mom had wanted grandchildren, Amy had wanted nieces and nephews but hadn’t fancied kids - but now...she wasn’t sure, now, that she would ever be able to look at a child of hers and not see the perpetuation of Rittenhouse and its twisted legacy.

“Then I can at least try and get you a fair hearing,” Sarah said, with a sharp little nod. “I can’t make promises, though.”   
“I don’t need you to,” Lucy rushed to assure her, “This is - it’s amazing. Thank you.”

“You may reconsider that when you get there,” Sarah muttered, “The pupils are all right, but the other teachers are a crop of ninnies-”

“You can’t call all your colleagues ninnies!” Queenie said exasperatedly.

“Why not? Most of them are.”

Bickering aside, Sarah was better than her word. It took most of a month and Garcia’s more experienced hand at forgery (with Sarah’s only-slightly-suspicious cooperation in providing a New York state teacher’s certification) to get the promise of a teaching job in the fall, but Sarah came through in the end. Lucy still wasn’t sure why, except that she and Queenie had been getting along better than ever since that night at the Blind Tiger, but she wasn’t about to look this particular gift horse in the mouth.

They were coming up hard on September now. The Wall Street Bombing was coming. Thirty-eight people killed, a hundred and forty-three serious injuries and total casualties somewhere in the range of four hundred. It wasn’t hard to see why Rittenhouse might be  _ interested  _ in something like this - public reaction to the bombing had led to just the sort of crackdown they’d want on foreign-born radicals on American soil, the empowering of J. Edgar Hoover’s General Intelligence Division and calls for a secret police in New York City to monitor radical elements. What was harder was trying to figure out just what role they had had, and what to do about it, now they were trapped in the past and without even the reduced resources they’d had in the bunker.

“The one political event in American history you don’t know everything about, and it’s the one we’re relying on to get us home,” Garcia had said one night in exasperation, and Lucy had batted at his arm where it rested around her shoulder and snorted at him for being ridiculous. Somewhere along the line, the tight quarters of the truckle bed had become normal. They had become experts at lying close enough together to share warmth, but not so close as to lead to any embarrassing moments come morning. Garcia was a restless sleeper, but less so than he had been at the start, and it had been weeks since the last choked gasp of ‘Lorena’ brought him jolting awake, dislodging Lucy from his chest and leaving them tiptoeing around each other for the rest of the day.

They needed to be at the scene, if possible in a position to be in one of the pictures, to make them easier to find. The trouble was, getting that sort of attention without one of them dying or being seriously injured was a very dubious proposition and- and, anyway, did they really want this one to go ahead? The conservative backlash it had led to had been playing right into Rittenhouse’s hands, and after the Salem Witch Trials-cum-Revolts...well, this didn’t seem like nearly as big a deal anymore. The problem being, any mention in the newspapers of Garcia Flynn or Lucy - whichever surname she used - would bring Rittenhouse down on them like a ton of bricks, and there was no telling whether they or the team would get there first. Still, it was the best chance they’d have this year, and nine months in 1920 would be more than enough.

Garcia had put out feelers, but the gang from the Blind Tiger was still a small-time operation, and didn’t really have many links with the sorts of anarchist groups that Buda had run with. Lucy searched the papers every day, and saved clippings in secret on the Sacco and Vanzetti Bridgewater trials, on anarchist and communist prosecutions, on anything that might give them even the slightest lead on Buda. And they argued. Garcia was, probably predictably, in favour of changing things - call in an anonymous bomb threat, or get their pictures in the paper for the team to find (and, coincidentally, perhaps the sort of financial rewards that would let them get an apartment of their own sometime before Christmas, because having to confine their arguments to low voices in the bed at night or passionate rows about the price of bread conducted more for the sake of being able to yell about  _ something  _ than anything else was fast coming to seem like the most frustrating thing in the world) as the two brave souls who had averted an anarchist bombing. Lucy had pointed out that doing so would certainly still inflame conservative anxieties and worsen the lot of immigrants, radicals and anyone opposed to Rittenhouse if their suspicions were correct. Garcia had retorted that, since  _ he  _ was an immigrant, at least this time there’d be something to balance things out and, anyway, wasn’t she usually the one in favour of preserving history?

The problem was, they couldn’t find Buda. The Wall Street Bombing had slipped into obscurity less than six years after it had taken place, though investigations had continued into the 1930s. He had barely merited a footnote in most of Lucy’s texts on Propaganda of the Deed anarchism, and however good she might be at her job, she didn’t actually have it memorised where Galleanist groups such as those Buda had frequented had met because she hadn’t expected to need the knowledge to deal with what was supposed to be a short trip to deal with one vote in January! All the same...the Galleanist package bomb plots of the previous year had been almost entirely unsuccessful, and accompanied by leaflets entitled ‘Plain Words’, in which the Galleanists had taken credit for their deeds. The Galleanists had been in disarray since spring, their numbers decimated by arrests, deportations and members forced to flee the country to escape prosecution. It was no wonder, under such circumstances, if Buda had not wanted to put his name to the deed, and yet...and yet. J.P. Morgan had been in Europe during the bombing, and the public location, too, was not in keeping with the earlier bombings, which had been restrained to the homes of various prominent politicians. A stepping-up of the Galleanists’ methods, or a sign that there had been another hand at work? She couldn’t say. It was frustrating beyond words. Lucy missed her books, she missed the internet, she missed being able to go back and check things when she wasn’t sure of her facts. She might not always have time to go and refresh her memory before missions, but she’d usually had more to go on than this. Rittenhouse had larger motives when they changed things...but then, this would not be a change. This was Rittenhouse operating in its own time, if it was Rittenhouse at all, and that was something Garcia had far more experience with than Lucy did.

They argued about it again in the last week of August - they’d been so close, this time, was the worst of it. Too close. They’d been too clear in the subject of their inquiries, and Buda had gone to ground so deeply that even those few contacts Garcia had carefully, painstakingly managed to cultivate in the Galleanist movement since June couldn’t find him. It could be the act of a guilty man, or just a scared one, but they didn’t have enough time left to worry about finding him.

“All we need to give them is his name!” Garcia was saying now in a furious undertone. They’d gone out onto the streets, under the pretext of running errands, so that they could speak freely even this early in the evening.

“And then what?” Lucy demanded. “If they deport him - if they execute him-”

“I was under the impression he was mostly notable for this one bombing.”

“He was still  _ meant  _ to live until 1963!”

“So were quite a few of the people at Salem meant to live long lives. Or die there. What makes this one different?”

“Because- Because we don’t even know he’s guilty! If it was someone else, if it really was an accident from the black market trade in explosives-”

“From what you’ve said, Buda’s hardly innocent even if he didn’t do this one. Look at his rap sheet, the guy had a hand in the Preparedness Day Bombing, and another in Milwaukee that killed...how many people, again?”   
“Nine police officers and one civilian,” Lucy supplied automatically. “And neither of those was ever proven, or he wouldn’t be free and in this country now.”

“So he’ll have one more near-miss.”

“And we won’t have stopped the bombing. Which was the point of this whole thing in the first place, so we’ll have changed the course of a man’s life for  _ nothing _ .”

They walked a little further in silence before Garcia spoke again.

“We don’t have to name Buda. I’m the last person to recommend going to the authorities, I know, but if we were to, say, mail in an anonymous bomb threat against Wall Street…”

“It’s a thought,” Lucy admitted. “But I can’t think of any way of doing that wouldn’t inflame anti-immigrant sentiments further. Not with the country in this state. Unless…” she stopped. “We could...could attribute it to someone else.” She frowned. “The Nativist movement is probably our best bet there, since the Free Society of Teutonia isn’t due to be founded until 1924…”

“When in doubt, blame the Nazis?” Garcia asked, a smirk in his voice. “Well, at least there’ll be no worrying about whether they deserve it this time.”

“Two evil conspiracies with one stone,” Lucy agreed. “Think we can come up with some convincing xenophobic gibberish to point the police the right way?”

“Well, as I recall your Alamo letter was pretty touching. Frustrating, at the time, but touching. Brought a tear to my eye and everything.”

Lucy laughed. “Yes, well, as we’ve established, you’re ridiculous.” She paused. “We’ll need to put in a few good strong hints about the cart. Maybe make that a sort of a challenge? ‘Stop us and you stand with our enemies’ or something like that? Or- No. Too much risk they might actually do it.”

“We send it to the press as well, then,” Garcia said, and nodded in a ‘well, that’s that settled’ sort of way.

“We’ll need a lot of copies - Uh...the Wall Street Journal, definitely. The New York Times, the Daily News, the Post...we can’t get the word to every newspaper in this city, and half of them wouldn’t care, but if we can get it to enough of them, they’ll all cover it, because if they don’t do it right away they’ll get scooped.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

It wasn’t all plain sailing after that. Paper cost money, and paper in the quantity they needed cost more than they could really afford. Added to which, the start of the school year was fast approaching, Lucy’s time increasingly taken up with lesson plans and trying to figure out how to adjust her usual teaching style for this sudden, younger audience. It was harder than she’d expected. It was always going to be, but...the thing was, teaching might be Lucy’s passion, but that had been teaching in the twenty-first century, with at least a veneer of academic freedom of speech. For a school teacher in the 1920s, at the mercy of the school board, there were no such protections. Already, limitations were being placed on what she could teach, and in how much detail, and what perspectives she was allowed to give. The Sedition Act was still in force and would be until December and, unfortunately, even if it hadn’t been, the school board would never let her teach about the uglier side of American history, not in this era. It had been twenty-eight years since the Pledge of Allegiance was introduced in public schools, and Lucy’s skin still crawled a little at the thought of having to lead it. Just to make matter worse, the pay was about as bad as it had been in the department store, and the conduct restrictions frankly appalling. The school Sarah taught at was over towards Little Italy, and not a parochial school, which was, in the Jewish-dominated Lower East Side, the only reason Lucy had been hired there, given she had been raised vaguely Episcopalian, even if, as an adult, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to tell anyone precisely what it was Episcopalians were really supposed to believe other than that Henry VIII had never been married to Catherine of Aragon, and even then she wasn’t sure that particular doctrine had followed the church to America.

Term started a few days into September, and between teaching by day and coming home to Mrs Blažičević’s futile attempts to teach her how to cook at night, it was a wonder the letters were finished by Monday the thirteenth of September, the start of the week that would lead to the Wall Street Bombing, though not if Lucy and Garcia had their say. Somewhere along the line, the priority had shifted from getting home to thwarting Rittenhouse, even not knowing whether Rittenhouse had a hand in this at all. Lucy wasn’t quite sure how that had happened. Maybe it was just desperation - they’d been stuck here nine months, spinning their wheels and barely scraping by, and both of them were chafing to do something, anything, that might remind them of why they were here in the first place, why they couldn’t just give up and let themselves slip into being Mr and Mrs Flynn, the rum-runner and the schoolteacher. There was no way of knowing if this one bombing meant anything, really, except- except that it was all a bit too convenient to entirely ignore, and if they were right, it might just lure Rittenhouse out, and if they were wrong, and it really had been an accident, thirty-eight lives would be saved on the sixteenth. They’d saved thirty-five lives on the Hindenburg, and Lucy’s whole world had been rewritten because of it, and that was the thought that kept her up at night, but after Salem...after Salem, she didn’t really have a leg to stand on about changing history.

The threats made the news. Not  _ headline  _ news, but news. The police were investigating, there was no need for alarm, but for the time being there was a blockade on Wall Street in response to  the threat, after last year’s anarchist bombings, although at least there was no word of anarchists being responsible this time. Lucy’s letter, ill-spelt and rambling as she had made it for artistic purposes, was printed in full in only two of the papers, but the effect was...maybe not as good as they could have hoped for, but maybe this was better - no sign of interference to tip anyone off as to where (or rather, when) they were. All the same, she lay awake on the night of the fifteenth, and in the morning, she knew she would not rest unless she saw it with her own eyes.

Calling in sick to work was a much more arduous process in the 1920s, even now telephones did exist, as most homes - and certainly most tenements - didn’t have them on the premises. She’d had to talk Garcia into telling Sarah to tell the principal, in the end, and to claim she had something infectious, but not necessarily life-ending, and would be back at work within the week or sooner, if he really thought it was a good idea. If she lost her job- Well, they’d probably have her back at the department store, and at least the pay would be better. She needed to see this one first hand. Just to be sure.

Wall Street was quieter than it ought to be, but the blockades were only stopping cars and carts, and foot traffic was as heavy as ever. It was half past eleven by Lucy’s watch, exactly thirty-one minutes before the bombing was due to take place. There was no cart bearing the letters ‘D’, ‘N’ and ‘T’, or with the words ‘Dupont’ or ‘Dynamite’ written on the side, as eyewitness accounts variously claimed.

“Satisfied?” Garcia murmured in her ear, as they found a convenient spot from which to watch the street. “Of course, if this  _ is  _ Rittenhouse, they won’t give up so easily.”

“I know.” Lucy frowned at the street. “They want an excuse to give the authorities greater power to victimise immigrants and radicals. That fits with their established MO. And I suppose they wouldn’t think a bunch of clerks and typists mattered enough to care about their deaths.” And wasn’t that just Rittenhouse all over? They ruled the world, and everyone else was there to be crushed under their heels, if they were even worth noticing at all. She bit down hard on the thought. Later. There’d be time enough for bitterness later.

“Where do your friends think you are?” she asked, just for the sake of saying something.

“The olive oil business isn’t exactly a nine-to-five job,” Garcia reminded her.

Lucy snorted. “Bit of an anachronism, isn’t that? The popular term in this era was ‘embalming’. Or ‘coffin varnish’, for the drink itself.”

“Really?” Garcia glanced at her, and Lucy smirked at him.

“I used to teach this stuff, remember? And Mom was always really big on social history, I remember-”

Her throat felt abruptly tight. She’d loved that side of her mom’s love of history, when she was a kid. It had made it all feel real, figuring out how things were done in the past, the  _ physicality  _ of history, the odd quirks, the little details that made the past feel alive. Had all of that been just...preparation of a historian, ready for Rittenhouse to start rewriting the world?

By the look on Garcia’s face, he knew what she was thinking. Thankfully, he didn’t say anything, but his hand came to rest on hers, squeezing lightly, and against her better judgement, Lucy couldn’t help but feel...seen, somehow. Understood.  _ Known _ . She squeezed his hand back, and for a moment felt better, but then-

Garcia’s gaze had fallen on something just across the street. He was frowning, focused on what he’d seen with a look like a dog that had scented a squirrel.

“Garcia?” Lucy said quietly, following his gaze, but unable to find its object in the close press of passers-be on Wall Street approaching noon. Except- No, it was too early, the police had blocked the street, how could it-

Everything seemed to happen very quickly after that.

A man - later, Lucy would not be able to remember anything about him but his moustache, a great ridiculous old-fashioned thing that only stuck in her memory at all by the penny-dreadful cliche perfection of it - withdrawing something from his coat. A bundle, a package, a- Oh.  _ Oh _ .

A shout, a thick accent, and then- The noise was unlike anything Lucy had heard before. A wall of bewildering, smothering noise, so loud that she could not even seem to really hear it. She felt it, she almost saw it, it vibrated her teeth and rattled her bones with the force of it. She reeled backwards- People were screaming- There was something wet dripping down into her eyes- There was an arm about her, steering her, and her feet followed before she quite realised what was happening. For a moment, all was noise and confusion, but then, all at once, clarity returned.

The street was heaving, panicked people running, the crush of the crowd almost too tight to be borne, all of it to get away from- She couldn’t count the bodies, but there were bodies left to count. The structural damage, she saw, with an odd, warped distance, seemed far less than in the timeline she remembered. A package bomb, not a cart. A suicide bomber, not a time-bomb. She raised her hand, brushed her fingers against the wetness on her face, and they came away bloodied. She hadn’t even noticed the pain.

“It was too early,” she said, “How did they move so fast? How did they-”

Garcia said something, but the words seemed to twist, they made no sense, no sooner in one ear than out the other. Something about the newspapers, about tipping their hand-

“How did they move so fast?” Lucy asked, more insistently this time - he had to answer her, even if he didn’t know. He’d have some theory, he always did, even when it was wrong, and even if it was wrong, her own mind...her thoughts weren’t obeying her, swimming off in all directions. Something was- It wasn’t right. Feeling like this. She ought to trust her own mind.

He was looking at her now with first frustration, then alarm. Why was he looking at her like that? It was too bright, far too bright, and too noisy, now she could hear again, and he was looking at her as if- as if something was wrong with her, and not the bright, loud, infuriating time around them, still so far from where - and when - they needed to be. They were walking-

And then, all at once, she was lying down on the truckle bed in Mrs Blažičević’s cramped little sitting-room, leaning against the wall. She sat up slowly, feeling at once ravenously hungry and as if she were about to be sick. There was a cool, damp towel pressed against her head, where the blood had been, and for a moment or two she could not tell the difference. She felt muzzy, almost drugged, the way she’d felt in those early days in a Rittenhouse cell after her mom had kidnapped her - had those days happened? Was the memory, the image, of a plain white room and a locked door, really hers? She remembered it in flashes, piecemeal. White walls. Food that did not taste of anything at all. Bruises. Bars at the window and a lock on the door. It had been warm there, as it was not here, she remembered vaguely, but why keep a prison cell warm?

“-hit her head,” Garcia was saying somewhere nearby. When she looked, slowly, the world swimming around her, he was rumpled, unkempt, there was a cut on his cheek and blood on the faintly-grubby white of his shirtsleeves. “I don’t think it’s serious enough for a doctor, but I saw head injuries like these in the war-”

Which war? He’d been in so many?

She didn’t realise until a moment too late that she’d spoken that thought aloud, and now Garcia looked even more worried. Had she not been supposed to know? He knew she’d read his file, she’t told him so, hadn’t she? Hadn’t she? She thought she had. She could remember...fragments. Words.  _ You saved people in Kosovo _ , she’d said once, over- They’d been drinking? In front of the television watching an old movie, or in the tavern at Salem, or in the catacombs beneath Paris with Lindbergh imprisoned not a stone’s throw away? All of it seemed to blur into one long, vague  _ before _ , out of which she could pick events at random, without context, details lost and adrift in the confusion of memories.

“-just needed rest, most of the time. I’m hoping it’s the same for Lucy.”

“Good. As if I don’t know you two couldn’t afford a doctor if she did need one. She’s not been right since you brought her in.” That was Mrs Blažičević. Not right. That was...one way to put it. Wrong. She was. Funny, to narrow it all down to that. She’d been wrong. They hadn’t stopped the bombing. They’d found a way around the barrier, around the plan. 

There was the creak of a door, footsteps on the stairs, and the bed creaked and shifted with it, as Garcia sat down.

“Lucy?” he said quietly, carefully. “Can you hold still for a moment? I need to check your pupils.”

The words sounded...distant, not quite right, but- The word ‘concussion’ wandered through Lucy’s brain, looking for something to connect with. Still...holding still was good. Moving her head too much made it hurt, as if someone were rattling dice and using her skull as a cup to roll them with.

His hands were very warm as they steadied her head so that he could look her in the eye. Absurd, that this could feel so much more intimate than months sleeping together in the most literal sense of the phrase.

“Jebote,” he muttered, low enough that even Lucy might not have heard it, had the whole world not seemed to be running loud just then, as if someone had turned an invisible volume dial up to maximum. “All right,  _ you’re  _ concussed, and we can’t afford a doctor.” He rubbed a hand across his face. “And, even if we could...too many questions. It doesn’t look too bad yet, which means there’s nothing either of us can do but let you rest up until it heals. Try to sleep, if you can manage it.”

“You’ll wake me up in an hour or two?” Lucy said, knowing he would. 

Garcia shook his head. “Doesn’t work nearly as well as common knowledge would have you think. I’ll keep an eye on you, make sure you don’t get worse in your sleep, though, if you’ll let me.”

“Not like I could stop you,” Lucy pointed out.

“Is that a no?”

“It’s a ‘get on with it’,” Lucy said irritably, rubbing at her eyes. “Ugh. This headache…”

“Is what tends to happen with a concussion, yes. You can process what I’m saying, though, which is probably a good sign.”

Lucy wanted to snap at him, but...she was tired, and she was stumbling over her words already. Grudgingly, she let herself be eased down on the bed, and watched through half-shut eyes as Garcia took a seat on the far side of the room, his eyes still on her.

When she opened her eyes again, the curtains were drawn and it was dark, though there was enough light that she could see Garcia, dozing in his chair. It was an odd sort of comfort, to see him there. Her head still hurt, but her thoughts felt clear, or at least clear _ er _ as she sat up, and the bed creaked loudly, startling him awake.

Garcia was not a slow waker, she had had occasional reason to notice, and he didn’t sleep heavily. Waking up, for him, happened all at once, a sudden start brought under control with equal suddenness.

“Lucy,” he said, an odd new rasp in his voice. “You’re - Do you remember the date and who the president is?”

Lucy blinked. “You didn’t ask me that before,” she pointed out.

“I did. You didn’t seem to understand what I was saying. Date, president. Come on. Please.”

_ Please _ ? He  _ was  _ worried.

“It’s the sixteenth of September, 1920, and the president is Woodrow Wilson,” she said, rather tiredly. “I haven’t been keeping track of the other set of dates, assuming it’s one-to-one and we’re not going to suddenly find ourselves most of a year older than we should be.”

Garcia grimaced. “I’m not going to bet on that. They’re not going to want to waste a year, or have to deal with having the whole team absent that long.”

Lucy tried to imagine it. A year would be bad enough, but it had been nine months now and no-one had come.  _ Why  _ hadn’t they come? They had made themselves hard to find, and this- this could not help, since they had avoided the newspapers this time. There wouldn’t be another chance until next year, and there was no guaranteeing that one would work either. They could be trapped here for years. She pictured returning to the bunker an old, old woman, in no state to go on missions, with no way to continue the life she had left behind, and shuddered.

“We bit off more than we could chew, going to the newspapers,” she said, rubbing her eyes, “It was  _ asking  _ Rittenhouse to see. Not that they don’t probably have people in the police as well.”

“And because we did it anonymously, it won’t even get us home,” Garcia summarised, his voice harmed.

Lucy nodded jerkily. “How many dead, in the end?”

“Fifteen,” Garcia replied. “A hundred or so injured, according to the evening news.”

Less than half the number of deaths there had been in the original timeline. Probably not all the same people, too. She didn’t know how many lives had been snuffed out in the future, with what they’d done today, but twenty-three more people were alive now than had been when they came back. 

“Great.” Lucy sat up, and lifted a hand to the wetness on her face - the cut had started bleeding again at some point. It was dripping down over her eyes.

“Here,” Garcia said quickly, getting up to pick something off the table and then coming over, a damp rag in his hand. “You were lucky,” he added, as he started slowly, carefully dabbing at the blood on her forehead, his hands sure and steady, for all that the iodine stung like anything. “Sorry,” Garcia muttered the first time she flinched. “Not much else on the market in 1920.”

“It’s fine,” Lucy said, screwing up her eyes against the pain, her nails digging in to the palm of her hand. “I- I’m sorry,” she said, because she felt it had to be.

Garcia’s hands stilled. “Nothing to apologise for.”

“No, it- It was my idea to do it this way. If we’d...I don’t know, tried to do something more attention-grabbing, got our names and pictures out there for the others to find-”

“I agreed with you. The police in Albany are still looking for the man who shot Speaker Sweet, and that’s without Rittenhouse in this era  _ or  _ the future trying to find out who it was forced them to downgrade to a package bomb instead of the original plan.” His hands were a little less steady now, as the cloth brushed over the blood drying on her cheek, her chin, her ear. “If you’re talking about walking into a site where we knew there’d be a bombing, though-”

“I know, I was too confident-”

“I should’ve argued more.  _ Jebote _ , Lucy, I thought-” Garcia broke off, his voice cracking, and when she looked up, the look on his face was like an open wound, fear and pain and desperate relief all at once, and something else as well, something Lucy flinched away from naming. He was looking at her as if- as if she was the only thing left in the world that made sense. And, all at once, she knew. Not in the way she had thought she had known with Wyatt, where she had been startled even as he said the words, but like...like the last pieces of an argument dropping into place once she’d assembled her sources. Like a thesis coming together in her mind, turning a collection of disparate points of data into something that told a story, that had a force all its own.

“You said it was a mild concussion,” she said, because what were you supposed to do with the realisation that your- your- that Garcia Flynn, whose connection with her was far too complicated to be summed up quickly, was- She was not ready to think the words ‘in love’, and it felt presumptuous to assume it...but that he felt something for you that was not, could not be, platonic or casual in the least. 

“I didn’t know. If there was permanent damage...medical care’s pretty barbaric in this day and age anyway, and with no Lifeboat…” Garcia’s face twisted in pain.

“Didn’t want to be left alone?” Lucy said, in an approximation of teasing, because this was - it all was - far, far too close to- to nights spent drinking vodka in Garcia’s room, before he’d been ‘Garcia’ to her. To talking about lost loved ones in a car on a dark Texas night. Moments when Wyatt’s suspicions had seemed both far too close to true and almost laughably inaccurate, because- because it would have been easier for her to admit to a sexual relationship with a former enemy than what there really was between them, how they knew each other, the things they’d shared. She’d slept with Noah, after all, and she’d hardly known him at all. This- The way they were with each other, the things she knew about him...it meant more. It was more. Sex could be casual, easily forgotten, meaningless. Intimacy of this sort could not.

“No,” Garcia said, and something in his voice- It wasn’t a joke anymore, or a tease. They were the only two people in the world who knew, or could ever know, the truth. That was not quite the same thing as being the only two people in the world, but- but sometimes it was hard to make the distinction. Lucy shifted a little, suddenly aware of how close they were, how easy it would be to close the gap between them.

Garcia drew away, and the moment was broken. “I don’t think we’ll have another chance this year,” he said. 

Lucy nodded, forcing her mind away from- Well, it had been a ridiculous thought. This...whatever it was...it wasn’t something she felt...felt ready for. Not yet. But soon.

“Next year doesn’t look promising,” she replied, instead of half the things she could have said, and almost wanted to. “Einstein is lecturing in New York in early April, but apart from that this state seems to be having a quiet year.”

“Two years,” Garcia said, resigned.

“At least,” Lucy confirmed. “Unless we find another way - historic documents, pictures - nothing that needs to be published now, but the sort of thing that might show up in social histories, museums on tenement life. It was less certain, maybe, but for the next year, with such limited options for travel, it was the best option they had.

They weren’t out of the game yet. Today, they’d changed history. That meant they could do it again. It was- Somehow, changing history was a lot more frightening when you couldn’t go back to your own time and check the damage. They were alone, they were stranded, they had no way of knowing if anything they did would have any effect at all. The least misstep might erase everything, might already have destroyed the world they knew. They had no way of knowing if the rescue they were hoping for would ever come.

Still, they had to try.


End file.
